Welcome to Kaleidoscope’s #23 (Winter 2015). Following the recent, successful redesign by Bureau Mirko Borsche, we are back with a brand new issue. The new formula is taking shape, new columnists and contributors are joining our ranks, and a lot of enthusiastic research went into curating the most compelling content out there.

In the opening section of HIGHLIGHTS, twelve profiles account for the best of the season: JASON MATTHEW LEE (by Alexander Shulan), DANIEL BAUMANN (by Aoife Rosenmeyer), MARYLIN MINTER (by Gianni Jetzer), MAGALI REUS (by Ruba Katrib), KNOW WAVE RADIO (by Alexandre Stipanovich), BEATRICE GIBSON (by George Vasey), CATHERINE AHEARN (by Tobias Czudej), K-HOLE (by Kevin McGarry), JAMIAN JULIANO-VILLANI (by Joshua Abelow), ALESSANDRO BAVA (by Francesco Garutti), ZHAO YAO (by Venus Lau), and IDEA BOOKS (by Xerxes Cook).

At a time when feminism resurges both in critical discourse and media headlines, while at the same time entering a list of words overdue to be banned, our signature MAIN THEME section is devoted to a reconsideration of female identities and role models. POST WOMAN is composed of a think tank, a think piece by Natasha Stagg and five interviews, including with Juliana Huxtable (by Andrew Durbin), Amalia Ulman (by Francesca Gavin), Judith Bernstein (by Hanne Mugaas), Massimiliano Gioni on “La Mamma” (with Pietro Rigolo), and Girls Like Us (by Felix Burrichter).

To follow, this issue’s MONO section and cover story are dedicated to Norwegian artist IDA EKBLAD. Fueled by an outright marvel for this thing called art, her work is distinguished by an extreme degree of impatience and prolificness. Her shift and turns are the result of a feverish engagement with pure materiality, synthesized with popular culture and animated by alien transformations. This definitive monographic survey comprises an essay by Peter J. Amdam, an interview by Cory Arcangel and an original portrait by Sølve Sundsbø.

Later on, the VISIONS section invites the eye to an enthralling journey across almost 100 pages of visual contributions by artists, curators and image-makers, including: TOBIAS ZIELONY, “Jenny Jenny”; MR.; “Chicago”: BARBARA CRANE and TONY LEWIS; DAVID DOUARD in Los Angeles; JONAS WOOD; “Alliantecnik,” curated by Alessio Ascari; TIMUR SI-QIN, “Premier Machinic Funerary”; and GRAHAM LITTLE.

C Magazine Issue 125 ATTENTION — includes Features by Shannon Anderson on An Te Liu; Mark Clintberg on the still life in the work of Celia Perrin Sidarous and Peter Morin; Kari Cwynar on Experimental Comedy Training Camp; Cameron Hu on GCC and geopolitical style; and Godfre Leung on attention, oblivion and jubilation in the work of Jeremy Shaw. Issue 125 also includes Artist Projects by Raymond Boisjoly and Duane Linklater, On Writing by Art + Feminism, Exhibition Reviews of Joseph Tisiga, Is Toronto Burning?, Why Can’t Minimal?, Susana Reisman, Jasmina Cibic, Kids These Days, Queering Citizenship, Burning Down The House and Mira Friedlaender, as well as Book Reviews of Daniel Albright’s Panaesthetics and David Balzer’s Curationism, and Inventory by Kitty Scott.

Outpost is an annual print publication on art, design and community action from cities that have been traditionally underexposed beyond their local contexts. Each beautifully produced and visually engaging issue of Outpost focuses on a single urban location and comes packaged with a limited edition print by an artist from the featured city. Outpost is a journey into the creative heart of a place, and via features like “Secretly Famous” (profiles of the most infamous artsy locals), guerrilla engagements with tourist attractions, historical explorations, mapping projects, and deep dives into artist collectives and organizations, Outpost exposes the myriad ways in which unique local communities arise through creative collaboration and production.

Exploratory and playful, critical with a sense of levity, and inspired by hand-drawn maps, flags, totem poles, poorly pixelated iPhone photos, moody landscapes, and the spirit of adventure, Outpost is dedicated to strengthening ties between communities and spreading new ideas about how creative culture can change our world.

C Magazine 122 includes features on Being in a State of Pure Belief: On the Work of Etel Adnanby Corrine Fitzpatrick, Willow, Weep for Me: Noa Giniger, Marian Penner Bancroft, and the Intricacies of Melancholy by Kimberly Phillips, Renzo Martens and the Institute for Human Activities by Nicholas Brown, Both Here and There: Canadian Artists and the Berlin Experience by Alexandra Phillips; plus Stopover, an Artist Project by Alexis Bhagat & Stephanie Loveless, and our regular sections On Writing, Exhibition Reviews, Book Reviews, and Artefact.

KALEIDOSCOPE’s newest issue, Issue 21 (Summer 2014), is a special edition dedicated to curating, aimed to decode the dynamics and implications of the profession — from funding to theoretical propositions, from circulation to consciousness-raising and from trend forecasting to commodification — and imagine its possible future developments.

In the opening section of HIGHLIGHTS, we have selected five emerging, ’80s-born practitioners from different backgrounds and continents — Alex Gartenfeld, Sarah Rifky, Hanne Mugaas, Anthony Yung and Luca Lo Pinto — representing a glimpse into the multiplicity of visions and motivations behind, as well as approaches to, the curatorial practice.    

To follow, the MAIN THEME section comprises four extensive discussions, involving as many as twenty-five international professionals — including Adam Szymczyk, Sarah McCrory, Lauren Cornell, Dena Yago and Mitchell Algus — to comment on how curating unfolds in such diverse frameworks as the not-for-profit organization, the large-scale exhibition, the Internet, and the commercial gallery.

Surprisingly, on the other hand, the MONO section and cover story are dedicated to an artist, Swiss living legend John Armleder — with a comprehensive interview by Andrea Bellini, an essay by Jeanne Graff and a portrait by Mathilde Agius — as a means to account for an organic and unconstrained approach to all sides of creative production and to hint at the long and enthralling tradition, of Duchampian descent, of artist/curators.

Lastly, the closing section of REGULARS features interviews exploring to what extent curatorial practice has strayed into other fields, such as architecture, cuisine and radio broadcasting: Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews NTS founder Femi Adeyemi; Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen talk appropriating exhibitions with cult curator Bob Nickas; Jesi Khadivi discusses the art scene in L.A. with man-about-town Michael Ned Holte; Carson Chan meets Venice Architecture Biennale’s key contributor Stephan Trüby; and Francesca Gavin interrogates editor Emma Robertson and promoter Alessandro Porcelli on the art of food.

This issue is enriched by our seasonal TIPS on reading, listening, stopping by, meeting and visiting; as well as three visual INSERTS, specially commissioned as so many experiments of exhibitions on paper: “Portraits of Society” curated by Nicholas Cullinan, ”Robert Mapplethorpe” curated by Elad Lassry, and “Coupling” curated by Piper Marshall.

GARAGISME is a biannual publication documenting automobile culture / est une publication semestrielle documenter la culture automobile.

1. Oscar Monzón: KARMA
2. Monica Uszerowicz: Customized cars of Broward
3. Nicolas Poillot: Dancing with(out) fear
4. CG Watkins: Racing Dude
5. Romaric Tisserand: The night watch
6. Basile Mookherjee: One Thousand and One Nights
7. Luke & Nik: Coriolus Station
8. Jamie Wald Aldam: What do farmers get up to behindthe wheel
9. Sanam Gharagozlou: The Paykan abides
10. Will Self: Madness of Crowds Speed Awareness
11. Alan Judd: Spies’ Cars
12. Stephen Bayley: Albert Camus’ Crash
13. Monica Uscerowicz: United Micro Kingdoms
14. Aurélien Arbet: On the other side of the dune
15. Amos Fricke: Hemmelrath Lackfabrik GmbH, Klingenberg, Germany
16. Harry Gould Harvey IV: Mountain Pass
17. Deutsche & Japaner: Constellations
18. Osma Harvilahti: Arrangements

C Magazine Issue 121 “Walking” includes features “On Speculative Walking: From the Peripatetic to the Peristaltic” by Randy Lee Cutler, “Walking Transformed: The Dialogics of Art & Walking” by Simon Pope, “Sissy Boys on YouTube: Notes Towards a Cultural History of Online Queer Childhood” by Jon Davies, “The Walk Exchange: Pedagogy and Pedestrianism” an Interview with Moira Williams by Earl Miller and “Walking with Artists” edited by Eugenia Kisin and Amish Morrell; plus an artist project by Sheilah Wilson with text by Stephen Horne, and our regular sections On Writing, Exhibition Reviews, Book Reviews and Artefact.

The biology or politics of seeping is like that of raw petroleum oozing at natural oil seeps. Unlike refined oil which has sponsored modernization and its aligned archives, crude oil pours beyond historical purpose and defies structural elevations – it instead disfigures the ground through which it dubiously spreads. This issue of Pages assumes ’seep’ as a post archival mode, where geography, culture and the body is approached through seepage, suspension, deviation and subtraction.

This issue contains contributions by Mariam Motamedi Fraser, Mark von Schlegell, Nima Parzham, Natasha Ginwala, Vivian Ziherl, Matts Leiderstam, Adam Kleinman, Suzanne Treister, Alexi Kukuljevic, Eugene Thacker and Saleh Najafi. Including in this issue are also reprinted materials, among others, correspondences between a filmmaker and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (former British Petroleum) around the making of a company film called “Persian Story” in 1951, and a 1977 newspaper article about Dennis Oppenheim’s involvement with a commissioned art work for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

The opening section of HIGHLIGHTS features Latvian-born painter Ella Kruglyanskaya (words by Chris Sharp); Danish performer Christian Falsnaes (interview by Raimar Stange); American painter Ned Vena (words by Mathieu Malouf); British artist Haroon Mirza (interview by Thom O’Nions); and Berlin-based Loretta Fahrenholtz (words by Michele D’Aurizio).

Edited by Kaleidoscope’s editor-in-chief Alessio Ascari and entitled #VOICEOVER, the MAIN THEME section is dedicated to the deployment of off-camera commentary as a conceptual device in moving image works. The survey presents an overview by Shama Khanna on a new generation of artists, including Ed Atkins, Camille Henrot, Pilvi Takala, Duncan Campbell and Laure Prouvost; a case study by Pablo Larios on Jordan Wolfson; an essay by Marie de Brugerolle on French filmmakers Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard; and a conversation between Oliver Laric and George Vasey on voiceover in the pop realm.

Riding the edge of contemporary art and show business, the controversial work of Francesco Vezzoli, our cover story and the subject of the MONO section, occupies a schizophrenic space between pop and conceptualism, high and low, cynicism and criticality. The section comprises an essay by Andrea Viliani, an interview by Kevin McGarry, and a visual project specially created by the artist based on Grindr profiles. 

A selection of videos featured in the Mono and Main Theme sections will be soon available to watch on KALEIDOSCOPE Videoclub, our new online channel of video exhibitions. Stay tuned!

Lastly, this issue’s section of REGULARS features Hans Ulrich Obrist introducing Swiss artist Kaspar Müller; Carson Chan meeting young global curator Simon Castets; Davide Quadrio reporting on the art scene in Shanghai, in conversation with local duo Birdhead; Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen rediscovering the art of Chicago artist Christina Ramberg in conversation with Albert Oehlen; and Matthew Erickson inaugurating a new series of articles focused on single art works, Close-up, with an in-depth look at Matthew Barney’s latest project, River of Fundament.

The issue is enriched by our seasonal TIPS on following, reading, listening, stopping by, meeting and visiting; as well as by three SPECIAL INSERTS by Belgian collective Leo Gabin, British maverick David Robilliard and Japanese legendary illustrator Hajime Sorayama.

KALEIDOSCOPE issue 19 (Fall 2013), is a special edition dedicated to contemporary art and culture produced in the Asia Pacific region. The release of this special edition — the first product of an ongoing investigation, evidencing KALEIDOSCOPE’s commitment towards establishing a presence in Asia — will be celebrated with a series of international launches and will inaugurate, in addition to the standard international circulation of the magazine, an extended distribution in Asian countries.

The opening section of HIGHLIGHTS features: LA-based Japanese artist Koki Tanaka, who pursues the Super-Everyday to find beauty in the ordinary, as explained by Miwako Tezuka; Chinese artist Li Ran, framed by Ho Rui An as attempting to get over the “postcolonial hangover”; Basir Mahmood, who directs his pragmatist gaze upon what Gemma Sharpe describes as the sociological imperatives of Pakistan’s urban life; Korean New Zealand artist Seung Yul Oh, whose practice is read by Emma Bugden as blurring the lines of art and play; and Filipino artist Maria Taniguchi, whose patterns and repetitions are, according to Joselina Cruz, elements of her latent archeology. 

Evocatively titled The Making of Asia, the MAIN THEME section discusses the creation and diffusion of local narratives in the Asia Pacific region: editor-in-chief Alessio Ascari interviews Lars Nittve, the director of Hong Kong’s megamuseum M+; art duo Desire Machine Collective talk to Shai Heredia, the founder of India’s most cutting-edge film festival; Gavin Wade speaks to Cao Fei about his new film and the problem of urbanization in metropolitan China; and a panel discussion brings together art initiatives from in and beyond the region — Arthub Asia, Guggenheim UBS Map, Asia Art Archive, and Tate Research Centre: Asia Pacific — around the idea of network.

Sitting between the traditions of cinema and visual art, the work of Chinese artist Yang Fudong — the protagonist of this issue’s MONO — resonates with the cinematic and photographic tropes of a city and society that is also “in between”: the decadent aura of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. As discussed in an essay by Davide Quadrio and Noah Cowan and an interview by Li Zhenhua, Fudong’s crisp black-and-white 35mm films enact a subtle interplay between the political and the abstract, revealing the artist’s passionate attraction to beauty and a rarified approach to the haunting questions of contemporary life.

Lastly, this issue’s section of REGULARS features Hans Ulrich Obrist introducing Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai; Gary Carrion-Murayari staging a three-way interview with art collectives The Propeller Group (Vietnam) and CAMP (India); Carson Chan meeting cultural activist Ou Ning; Melanie Pocock reporting on the art scene in Singapore; and Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen rediscovering the art of cult psychedelic artist Keiichi Tanaami.  

The issue is enriched by our seasonal TIPS on following, reading, listening, stopping by, meeting and visiting; as well as by three SPECIAL INSERTS, including a selection of paintings by Chinese artist Wang Xingwei; pictures by Japanese photographer Keizo Kitajima; and a series of digital collages by Filipino artist Pio Abad.